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Comment Re:Emma Watson is full of it (Score 1) 590

Also, your use of "feminazi" really gives away the game about your true feelings on this issue. You don't really believe that feminists have any real political power, do you?

Great, so people here using the word grammar nazi have given themselves away too. They must be thinking grammar teachers have real political power.

Comment Re:Maybe (Score 1) 253

buying 10,000 CNC mills to mill their phones' "unibody" frames from solid metal in mass production, when any sane phone company would use injection molded plastic because that's cheap and easy

Cheap, easy and better. Plastic doesn't dent, protects innards much better than metal, and even protects the screen somewhat better than metal. Metal is plainly the wrong material for phone body.

Comment Re:The whole article is just trolling (Score 1) 795

reason for the shirt to exist. In that case, the answer is obvious: because someone created it

No. Answer could be
1. John didn't let me destroy the shirt
2. We failed to H-bomb the warehouse before the shirt was shipped from there.

See what happened? Asking "why" about non-sentient beings, or about sentient beings doing things unintentionally actually means "what could I have known which would enable ME to predict that this would happen ?" It is an imprecise question because the question is put in terms which mean different from what is being said. It is better to directly ask "what could I have done to predict this" when talking about precise things.

The real "why" is always about sentient beings. Either the being doing something, or about the questioner being able to predict the event.

Comment Re:The whole article is just trolling (Score 1) 795

"Why" is a very ambiguous and unhelpful question. In typical language, why means one of 2 very different things :

1. When asked of a sentient being, with an agency, doing an intentional activity - e.g. "why did the chicken cross the road". Here the question "why" expects the answer explaining something about the mental process of the sentient being which made it "want" to cross the road.

Once the question "why" is asked and like you do, speculated that there might be an answer to the "why", this is a huge logical fallacy many people fail to catch. This presupposes that there is a "sentient being" or one with agency that caused events. But since most people don't realize the meaning of "why", they are trapped.

2. When asked of non-sentient things, or beings doing something unintentionally, the question "why" is very ambiguous. E.g. "why did the pen catch fire". The answer is generally to read a lot into the question and describe "why" (1) the event should have been expected even before it happened. The expectation is by a sentient being, so the first definition of "why" is applicable. So the answer could be
A. "because it was made of wood".
B. "because ink in it was combustible".
C. "because Greg burned it with a matchstick".

See what happened? A sentient being was invented - a great way to advance the cause of religion again.

In answer A, it is assumed the questioner did not expect a pen to be made of wood, but actually questioner did not ask what the pen was made of. Answer B is about the ink, again something that was not asked.

Basically, it is not incorrect to say, that "why" doesn't mean anything. At least when talking in precise terms, vague questions like "why" which are intentionally vague only make the conversation more difficult without contributing anything positive.

Comment Re:In lost the will to live ... (Score 1) 795

Honestly, I view statistics as the belief system of science. It can't be proven

A system cannot be proven. A hypothesis can be - in science at times the "proof" is just a single experiment and lack of refutation. So if you go about "proving" a "system", you come across like an idiot trying to "eat" "politics".

What hypothesis prevalent in the field of statistics do you think cannot be proven?

Comment Re:In lost the will to live ... (Score 1) 795

Yes, most of us agree that it's wrong to willfully hurt others, but why? If you think that we're just collections of cells, then the only thing you should care about is your own personal survival and comfort, and nothing else.

No, it does not even follow that a "collection of cells" should care about its own personal survival and comfort.

Comment Re:Not a boycott but a confirmation (Score 1) 469

Ok, so non-text binary logs are acceptable when equal or more variety of tools are available to view/manipulate them vs text binary logs.

Which is not yet, so your objection to objection to binary logs is invalid at the moment.

There is NO REASON a binary log format could not be as well documented and supported, particularly if it were a standard across all linux distros.

There is one. It is called text. Hence the objection against "binary" formats, which colloquially but imprecisely refers to "non-text binary" formats.

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